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Technology Stocks : Ascend Communications (ASND) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: gbh who wrote (48089)	6/5/1998 2:05:00 PM
From: bucky89	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 61433

Gary, Okay we can go through this again. It's always fun to speculate. Paul Johnson summed up my thoughts very well: "...Lucent doesn't even even know how to spell IP...". Lucent is a voice equipment company, and they have a strong presence in the carrier market due to their voice TDM switches. When it comes to packet switching, they are newbies. Cisco is king of packet switching. The problem for Lucent is that in ten years, voice will only be a very small fraction of all networking traffic. TDM as a technology will be obsolete. Lucent must make a transition to packet switching. Who have they bought which will give them a presence in the carrier-class data market? Not Livingston, and not Yurie. Livingston is concentrated in a niche market for remote access servers, and Yurie does ATM for enterprise customers. Come Oct 1, Lucent will have a $30B shopping budget, and they could easily swallow Ascend. It would be so much easier and less risky to buy the technology and market presence outright. I see nothing unique about the Packetstar switch. It will have to go through months and years of testing before the first product will be put into a live production network. The Lucent engineers will first need to learn how to spell 'IP' before they can swim with the sharks. That will take years. The GRF has already been through this shakeout, and is now competing head-to-head against Cisco's BFR. The only thing the GRF lacks is marketing muscle. Lucent can supply that. As far as Yurie, all the panelists were shaking their heads on this. Pretty much everyone agrees that Lucent screwed up and overpaid. I think they will realize this sooner or later. At that point, they will buy Ascend at their earliest opportunity. If I were a Lucent shareholder, I would dump the stock if LU doesn't buy ASND. Looking forward to the next ten years, without Ascend I can't see LU being as dominant of a player in data as they have been with voice switches. Just MHO bucky89 Another quote from Paul Johnson: "For Lucent to buy Bay Networks is like Novell buying Word Perfect...Cisco has won the battle for the enterprise router market. Lucent has to look to the carrier market..."